Together we can make the property sector better

It’s an issue about which everybody here at the brand feels incredibly passionate. We’ve been writing about this issue on and off for the past five years or so, and we wanted to bring everything that we have been doing on an ad hoc basis together into a concerted campaign.

We know we’re not the first to launch such a campaign - although hopefully we’ll be one of the last to need to do so.

We will work alongside and build on the good work already being done by organisations and initiatives like the RICS through Surveying the Future, the Reading Real Estate Foundation through Pathways to Property, Women in Property, Freehold, Changing the Face of Property, and many more.

We are also really pleased to have a panel of senior industry figures who will be supporting the campaign through regular columns, articles and events.

We hope that the fact that we are a media organisation rather than a property company or lobby body can bring additional benefits to the work being done elsewhere.

A big part of this is that we want Open Plan to be open source; rather than being a top down initiative, we want as many people to contribute as possible. We’ve put our manifesto and targets out there, and these will be further refined in conjunction with our panel over the coming weeks, but we want you to email us, write to us, contact us on Twitter or Facebook, leave comments on the website, collar us at events and let us know what you think.

We want you to criticise our suggestions, get angry that we have missed the point, suggest new targets, events or people to contact, tell us what we should be doing. We are not precious, and we promise to publish your views, and be as open as is practically possible to shaping the campaign to be what you want it to be.

We want the openness and transparency we will show to be mirrored by the industry itself. That is why a big plank of what we aim to achieve revolves around facilitating research into the true demographic makeup of the industry. We then want to measure how this changes year on year.

Of course we are not calling for quotas, but once you know the real numbers, you have a target you can try to beat. And if there is no improvement, this needs to be highlighted, the industry (including us) held to account, and new strategies devised.

Finally, what we hope to bring to this issue is consistency and regularity. We plan to produce journalism on this campaign every month at the very least, online and in print, and regularly update you on the various initiatives ongoing elsewhere.

The reasons why this is needed are well known. There is also a business case for diversity that is well made and familiar. But overall, creating a more open property industry, and allowing a greater spread of the population to share in its benefits, is just the right thing to do.